OPINION: Running Universities as Businesses is Killing Tertiary Education
Words by Jess Ye (she/her)
Last week, Otago University announced several hundred job cuts and a budget reduction of $60 million. This was due to a 0.9% drop in student enrolments compared to last year. Elsewhere, Massey is down 8%, Auckland is down 5%, and AUT is down 4%. Victoria University is facing a 12.1% drop in enrolments. The university hasn’t made any decisions regarding redundancies yet, but you can do the maths.
Whilst we can consider how universities could attract more students, it would be narrow-minded to ignore the larger picture. Since the 1980s, successive governments have upheld a broken financial model for tertiary education that fails universities and students. The hypocrisy of this is that many of our current MPs experienced the free, or very low, tuition of the pre-1980s tertiary education system.
The enrollment drop is an inevitable consequence of the neoliberal tertiary education reforms of the 1980s, when the government set up universities to operate as businesses and students as consumers. Since then, governments have consistently decreased funding to universities whilst the cost of education has been imposed upon students in a ‘user pays for the individual investment’ ethos. To get funding, universities must compete with other tertiary institutions for student enrollments.
In a cost of living crisis, less and less people are choosing university study. Having to work over 20 hours a week to pay for your shitty flat isn’t an enticing option for your future or wellbeing. Universities are competing for a diminishing pool of people who can afford to study. And when student numbers drop, even by 0.9%, universities are forced to make significant funding cuts that are incredibly detrimental to the quality of our education and the support services that assist us. This is a volatile system where the stability of our education is left up to the free market rather than a safeguarded public good.
The cost of living crisis is especially awful now, but decades of normalised student poverty was always going to lead to diminishing student numbers. Universities will increasingly become institutions for the rich. This is problematic because universities nurture our next generation of critical thinkers. Without more diversity of lived experiences in universities, our nation loses out on having different knowledge reflected in the research, policies, and culture that shape us.
Our generation has grown up with normalised, if not glorified, student poverty and debt. Many of us feel like this student poverty and the failings of our tertiary education system is insurmountable. We feel that it always has been, and always will be, a mountain that we can’t move.
We can believe that an alternative world is possible. Our tertiary education system consists of a series of political choices made not that long ago (only in the 1980s). The worst part of this system is that it’s taken away our belief that we could have a right to better financial support from the government. We can have a universal student allowance and we can have free tuition.
Universal student allowance isn’t just about better financial support for you. It’s about the intertwined fate of tertiary institutions, our whānau, communities, and our future. VUWSA’s campaign for a universal student allowance pushes for this change.
If you want to stay up to date with the campaign or get involved, go to: ^tinyurl.com/universalstudentallowance.